[Previous entry: "Email forwards"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Singularity"]

09/03/2001 Archived Entry: "A good documentary?"

I've just had the opportunity to watch the recording I made last night of Testing for God, and I was delighted to see that it was perhaps one of the most intelligent documentaries I've seen of any subject - and that this documentary was about how science is pushing God out of lives through an explanation of the creation of the universe only made that achievement more impressive.

The documentary producers managed to put together a good cast of scientists and theologians including Roger Penrose and Frank Tipler, people who are at the top of their respective fields in mathematics and physics. There was a good, informed discussion about exactly how we have evidence for the Big Bang and how it may have come about through fluctuations in the quantum foam. They then, to my hopeful expectations, moved onto the problem of the setting of the 'parameters' of the universe through physical laws and then had old Tipler talking about the anthropic principle. I doubt that there's been a TV programme in recent history that's managed to deal with such concepts in a concise and clear manner - you can't believe how pleased I was to hear someone refer to the 'God of the Gaps' on TV.

It wasn't perfect - things rarely are. I felt that the programme spent too much time building up the promise of science explaining everything and then engaged in a bit of schadenfreude* in saying that when you got down to it, the anthropic principle wasn't entirely satisfactory and thus science had 'committed suicide' with its explanation of the Big Bang, which was a bit absurd.

Also, the production values were a little uneven. The interviews were perfectly fine but some of the voice editing and computer generated sequences looked like they belonged in a bad Discovery Channel documentary (read as: they looked really cheap and nasty).

Still, I'm not one to pick at these things (hah!). It was only the first programme in a three part series and the next episode will examine the problem of biological evolution. I'll certainly be looking forward to see how they handle that.

*On checking this on Google, I discovered I spelt it correctly the first time! It reminds me of a passage in Steve Pinker's How the Mind Works, where he talks about the erroneous assumption of some ethologists that other cultures (usually small, out of the way primitive tribes) don't share the same emotions as us like sadness and anger, because they don't have words for them. This belief persisted for a while until some researchers went over to talk to the tribes and say, 'Hey, have you ever felt like this,' and the tribespeople say, 'Yes! You mean that there's a word for that?'.

It's like saying that only the Germans can experience a malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others just because they're the only guys who have a word for it, which, I'll hope you'll agree, doesn't make any sense at all.